High Numbers of Foreigners Establishing Businesses in Georgia
Georgia has seen an increasingly large number of foreign citizens choosing to build businesses here in recent years. In 2017, The World Bank ranked Georgia as the 4th best country for ‘starting a business’, out of 190 other nations. What is it about our ex-Soviet country that is so appealing to them? I met this weekend with Thejus Thomas, the owner of a recently opened hostel, to find out.
He began by telling me how he and other foreign citizens see Georgia as a country that is developing very quickly and has a lot of opportunity because of this. “Georgia is growing, we think it will soon be part of the EU, so more travelers will be coming here. Now is the time to build a business, while it is cheap and there is a lot of opportunity, because the future should see a big return.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, in a clever move to bring capital into the country, it was the idea of former president Mikheil Saakashvili to get rid of bureaucracy for people wanting to set up a new business.
Mr. Thomas went on to talk about his own experience of this. “In Georgia, it is very easy to setup a business. It is very fast.” In fact, you can register a new business in just one day in Tbilisi.
He added that “no big investment is needed to set anything up. In other countries, you need a substantial investment.”
So, how did he discover Georgia, being all the way over in India? Word-of-mouth, of course! “A friend told my father about it, so we looked it up online and decided to go for it. When we got here, we met other Indians who said the same thing and helped us to get started.”
He seemed happy to be here, running a business, and his face bore a luminous smile as he provided his answers, I wondered if he could tell me anything negative. He pondered, but the only problem he could think of was the occasional language barrier. “If I go to a place like the markets, I have a real problem with communication. Sometimes English isn’t enough.”
We quickly moved to his favorite thing about Georgia, which he declared was “the food. I love the national dishes, Khinkali and Khachapuri, and how the fruit and vegetables are always fresh. In India, they inject chemicals to keep them fresh, but here it’s all natural. The same goes for the wine!”
So, it seems the work of the former president has succeeded. With minimal start-up costs and negligible bureaucracy, Georgia is growing very quickly. Foreigners are recognizing this, and are coming here in high numbers, that are sure to increase in the coming years. The country has changed miraculously in the last two and a half decades, setting a strong example for its neighbors.
By Tom Day